Andhra cabinet clears Rs.2,358 crore e-governance project

The Andhra Pradesh cabinet on Saturday approved the Rs. 2,358 crore e-Pragati project, a comprehensive framework for providing e-services to the citizens.

The project, developed in association with IT major Wipro in eight months, is expected to pave way for digital Andhra Pradesh, ensuring coordination among departments and transparency in their functioning.

The cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu decided to implement the e-governance project, which consists of 72 projects grouped into 14 packages whose estimated outlay is Rs.2,358 crore which will be funded and implemented over a three-year period.

Of this, the government will invest Rs.1,528 crore and the remaining will be mobilised in PPP mode.

A statement from the chief minister's office said the AP State Enterprise Architecture (APSEA) has been rechristened as 'e-Pragati.' With ePragati, Andhra Pradesh becomes the first state in India to conceive and execute a state-wide enterprise architecture.

"This will become a model in government enterprise architecture in India," said Chandrababu Naidu.

e-Pragati extends to 33 secretariat departments and over 300 government agencies. It seeks to provide a bouquet of 745 services in the government to customer (G2C), government to business (G2B), government to enterprise (G2E) and government to government (G2G) areas.

The major components of e-Pragati revolve around 7 missions, 5 grids and 5 campaigns. AP Fibre Grid will connect all gram panchayats), AP State Data Centre will host all the data and applications, e-Highway will seamlessly connect all the departments digitally, People Hub will house all the socio-economic data of the citizens of the state which will be used to implement welfare schemes and development programs.

The other components include Lab Hub, which contains details of all types of land parcels in the state, Dial AP, a unified contact/call centre that the citizens can use to access a wide range of services, e-Learning platform, social benefits management system, APcan, a system for management of cancer, mSeva, a platform for providing a wide range of citizen services on mobile, e-AgriMarket to enables farmers to sell their produce online to get the best price and e-Panchayat which enhances efficiency of Panchayat Raj institutions.